My wife drinks way too much, but she never loses control. What do you suggest? | Leading Questions

I’ve been with my wife for almost twenty years. Back then, food and wine were things we enjoyed to relax. When Covid hit, I was already worried about my own drinking and during the lockdowns, we both went a bit crazy. Since then, my wife has been working from home a lot more. Although my intake has been up and down, she opens a strong beer every day at 5pm and often follows with wine or cocktails. Yesterday it was a bottle of wine, although I didn’t have any.

Her consumption is way above all published guidelines, but she never loses control, she is fun to be around, she is always willing to help our son get ready for school, and she continues to excel in her stressful job. Drinking really doesn’t cause any problems. I worry that this could suddenly spiral out of control and I will feel terrible for not doing anything. Also, her family has a history of dementia and I worry that it could make that worse.

Although she seems relaxed, she is actually quite anxious and I know that bringing this up would not be well received. At this point, I am simply not drinking in the hopes of lowering the norm in our house. I realize that is a bit weak, but it is hard to make a preemptive strike on a problem that is not yet there. What do you suggest?

Eleanor says: Much of our cultural thinking about alcohol involves two clear categories: There are the capital D, capital P Problem Drinkers, for whom the only solution is to do 12 steps and never drink again, and then there are everyone else, who, by virtue of not being in the first category, are not problem drinkers. Your wife isn’t stumbling around drunk or missing work, so she doesn’t fit our stereotype of the first category. But one of the problems with this clear-cut categorization is that if you’re in a mildly bad relationship with alcohol, you can look at the AA trope of “addict” and think, “That’s not me, so I must be OK.”

In reality, there’s a whole spectrum of ways to deal with alcohol, and our cultural expectations of “addicted” are just one extreme. There’s the slightly too-strong agitation when there’s none in the fridge. There’s the forgetting what it’s like to start the day without a headache. There’s the feeling of genuine dread about going on a date without drinking. None of these include slurring, stumbling, and throwing up. But they are ways to put a terrible buzz under what should be a fun experience—the fact that you feel like you can’t talk about drinking is a bit of that buzz, for example.

It might be helpful to move from the question, “How can I get my wife to stop drinking so much?” to “How can we help with what makes my wife want to drink so much?” You mentioned that she’s an anxious person. Are there other things in her life, besides alcohol, that take the edge off a hard day? Between the demands of her job, the house, the kids, is there something else that gives her peace and calms her down before bed? If not, what might work?

Perhaps you can also make this part of a conversation about your shared health goals at this point in your lives. Put aside the “relationship with alcohol” for a moment, put aside the “telling me what to do” for a moment, there is a simple, non-accusatory case to just “get healthy together.” Drinking more than recommended means more than your liver can handle. Blood tests and doctor visits can be great ways to figure out the cumulative effect of our “above recommended levels” vices, and also a great way to get motivated to change them, just like you get all motivated and excited about flossing after the dentist.

I know it can be hard to talk about drinking, but sneaking changes can just seem passive-aggressive. Trying to subtly change behavior without explaining why is what we do with kids and animals. She might think that’s how you treat her when you stock the fridge with nonalcoholic drinks or say, “Are you sure you need another drink?”

We feel patronized, especially when it comes to choices we don’t want anyone to notice. If you want her to change her choices, it will feel a lot more dignified from her perspective if you treat her as someone who makes those choices.

The trick is not for either of you to see alcohol as a right or an enemy. It’s to see it as something you have around to the extent – ​​and only to the extent – ​​that it makes your life better. Adults are allowed to drink for fun. It’s when drinking stops being fun that we should pay attention.

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